A federal judge is handing a Louisiana man a year in prison for pirating thousands of DVDs and CDs in a case highlighting the Motion Picture Association of America’s wildly varying valuation of pirated discs.

In the case of Tanner Hills of Louisiana, according to court records, (.pdf) an MPAA expert concluded that the 3,557 bootleg DVDs seized from the defendant’s Jefferson Parish apartment outside New Orleans was valued at $67,583. That’s $19 a disc for such films as Borat, Bambi, 300 and Premium.

And if you think those numbers are high, consider last year when the MPAA said 200,000 illicit DVDs seized in Australia were worth $83 per movie disc. Some 6,200 pirated discs were also found in Hong Kong that year, and the MPAA affixed value at $20 million, meaning each disc was worth $3,225.80. We’re not kidding.

For Hills, the inflated figures don’t really matter. The two counts (.pdf) of criminal copyright infringement to which he pleaded guilty require an illicit cache of $2,500 or more.

But it matters when the MPAA, the movie studios’ lobbying arm, declared Tuesday that movie piracy costs foreign and domestic producers, distributors, theaters, video stores and pay-per-view operators "$18 billion annually as a result of movie theft."

The MPAA said "More than $7 billion in losses are attributed to illegal Internet distributions, while $11 billion is the result of illegal copying and bootlegging."

It’s eye-popping figures like these that get lawmakers’ attention.

Los Angeles officials recently adopted an eviction ordinance for pirates based largely on MPAA numbers. Now Congress, pressed by lobbying by the MPAA and Recording Industry Association of America, is considering creating a Cabinet-level copyright czar and granting the U.S. attorney general the authority, for the first time, to file civil lawsuits for copyright infringement.

And in case you’re wondering, the RIAA valued the 2,896 CDs seized from Hills’ apartment at $39,791, or $13.74 a disc. Artists included Tupac, Lil Wayne, Snoop Dog, Jay-Z and R Kelly.

The RIAA said Tuesday that "global theft of sound recordings cost the U.S. economy $12.5 billion in lost revenue and more than 71,000 jobs and $2 billion in wages to U.S. workers."

The RIAA floated the numbers and the MPAA touted its numbers when urging Congress to adopt the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007, (747-page .pdf) which requires universities to "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as to plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity."

The Senate passed the measure two weeks ago. It is awaiting President Bush’s signature.